ROLES:
Each week, blogging will be structured by roles:
Readers: These students are responsible for posting initial questions and insights about the week’s reading material. Readers should consider and discuss all of the weekly readings, and try to make connections between the various texts. Reader posts must be posted to the class blog by 5pm on Monday afternoon.
Viewers: Students in this group will pose initial questions and insights into the week’s feature screening. Viewer posts must be posted to the class blog by 10am on Thursday morning.
Searchers: Students in this group find and share at least one relevant online resource (an article, a video, an interview, etc.). In addition to linking to or embedding the resource, the searchers provide a short evaluation of the resource, highlighting what makes it worthwhile, unusual, or, if appropriate, problematic. Searcher posts must be posted to the class blog by 10am on Thursday morning.
Relaxers: Students in this group will have the week off from blogging.
You are expected to take your blog posts seriously. Pick interesting clips and topics, and be creative, insightful, nuanced, and clear in your thinking and writing. You are encouraged to post more often than is required for your grade. Such additional participation will be duly noted and factored into your final grade as extra credit.
STYLE GUIDELINES (courtesy of Leo Goldsmith, PhD ):
• The blog is a place for experimentation, rumination, questioning, challenging, and obsessing. Write about films, videos, images, and subjects that interest you. Feel free to be personal (but remember that whether you like something is not always the most interesting thing you can say about it).
• That said, the blog is also a place to address the ideas of the course in a meaningful way. You must:
• use complete sentences, correct grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and so forth.
• cite those you quote—this is not just polite to the people who came up with the ideas in the first place, it’s also helpful to your readers.
• If your quotation comes from a publicly accessible website, you may directly link to the text by attaching the URL to the author’s name.
• If it comes from a book or journal not publicly accessible (including password-protected journals accessed via the Emory Libraries website), you may use “an in-text citation like this”—Gregory Zinman, FILM 485 (Atlanta: Emory University, 2024), 637— subsequent in-text citations can be shorter, “like this” (Zinman, 493).
• Remember you’re being graded (see grading rubric below).
• Remember you’re being read—potentially by anyone with an internet connection.
• The text-formatting functions in the WordPress interface are largely intuitive and some are automatic. You may want to compose your blog post in your usual word-processing software (e.g. Microsoft Word), copy-and-paste your text into WordPress, and adjust or edit as necessary. (Most elements of formatting, including italics, will carry over to the blog.)
• Include images! Include videos! Include links! More is more.
• REMEMBER TO TAG AND CATEGORIZE (Week and Role) YOUR POSTS.
GRADING:
If you are curious about the criteria I employ when grading blog posts, please refer to this chart developed by Professor Mark Sample of Davidson College:
| GRADE | CHARACTERISTICS |
| A | Exceptional. The blog entry is focused and coherently integrates examples with explanations or analysis. The entry demonstrates awareness of its own limitations or implications, and it considers multiple perspectives when appropriate. The entry reflects in-depth engagement with the topic. |
| B | Satisfactory. The blog entry is reasonably focused, and explanations or analysis are mostly based on examples or other evidence. Fewer connections are made between ideas, and though new insights are offered, they are not fully developed. The entry reflects moderate engagement with the topic. |
| C | Underdeveloped. The blog entry is mostly description or summary, without consideration of alternative perspectives, and few connections are made between ideas. The entry reflects passing engagement with the topic. |
| D | Limited. The blog entry is unfocused, or simply rehashes previous comments, and displays no evidence of student engagement with the topic. |
| F | No Credit. The blog entry is missing or consists of one or two disconnected sentence. |